Ahmed Seif, Who Was Tortured in Egypt and Became Rights Defender, Dies at 63

Ahmed Seif in 2011. He was imprisoned at least four times under two Egyptian presidents.Credit
Shashank Bengali/MCT, via Getty Images

Ahmed Seif, whose experience of torture as a political prisoner in Egypt inspired him to become a leading human rights lawyer defending leftists, Islamists, atheists and gays, died on Wednesday in Cairo. He was 63.

His family said the cause was complications from heart surgery.

Crowds leaving the cemetery after his funeral on Thursday held up banners calling him “the sword of the people” and “the exemplary fighter.” Among them were his son, Alaa Abdel Fattah, and his daughter Sanaa Seif, who were temporarily released from prisons to attend the ceremony. They have been incarcerated for protesting repression by the Egyptian government.

In his funeral remarks, Mr. Fattah was defiant. “My father died a martyr, and you know who killed him,” he said, according to The Associated Press. He referred to the stress caused by the arrest of Mr. Seif’s children and the postponement of necessary surgery because of judicial procedures.

Mr. Seif was himself imprisoned at least four times, twice during the rule of President Anwar el-Sadat and twice under President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in 2011.

Mr. Seif’s contrarian nature, for good and ill, defined his career. In 2011, he found himself in the familiar position of being under arrest, this time for participating in protests against President Mubarak. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, then Egypt’s defense minister and now its president, was touring the prison and stopped to tell a group of prisoners that included Mr. Seif that people should respect the military leadership, stop protesting and go home.

Mr. Seif replied that Mr. Mubarak was corrupt. Mr. Sisi “became angry, his face became red,” Mr. Seif was quoted as saying in the newspaper The Guardian. “He lost it.”

That incarceration lasted only 48 hours. In the 1980s, he was jailed for five years for joining a left-wing group. He endured beatings and electrical shocks, and he came to detest torture as “a form of cancer that can eat up a country’s youth and stifle its ability to change, criticize, reform and rebel,” he said.

He responded by studying law while in prison. After his release, he apprenticed with a law firm and started volunteering to do legal work for causes he supported. In 1983, he handled the case of Nasr Abu Zayd, a liberal professor who was denied a promotion by Cairo University because of his views. Mr. Zayd was convicted of apostasy and forced to divorce his wife because under Islamic law a Muslim woman cannot be married to an apostate.

Mr. Seif took many unpopular clients, including Islamists with whom he fundamentally disagreed. In 2001, he represented 52 men who were arrested aboard a floating gay nightclub moored on the Nile and charged with “habitual debauchery.” Despite worldwide criticism of the prosecution, 23 of the men were convicted and sent to prison.

In 2004, Mr. Seif represented men accused of bomb attacks on tourist hotels in the Sinai Peninsula that killed 34 people. He did not defend the bombings, but argued that the men should have been exonerated because they were tortured to get confessions. Three were sentenced to death, and 10 received lesser sentences.

Two years later, Mr. Seif defended a blogger, Kareem Amer, who was prosecuted on charges of antireligious remarks and insults to President Mubarak. He was the first blogger in Egypt explicitly arrested for the content of his writing. Mr. Amer was sentenced to several years in prison, where he was beaten, according to human rights groups.

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Ahmed Seif al-Islam Hamad was born on Jan. 9, 1951, in the delta province of Beheira in Egypt. His father, he said, belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose fundamentalist ideology was far removed from the leftist views the son adopted. He earned degrees in politics and economics and in law at Cairo University. In a biography on the Human Rights Watch website, he said he joined an underground Communist organization.

But politics, he decided, was not enough. During his five years in jail in the 1980s, he said, “I made a decision that it was no use to have political activity without human rights.”

He continued: “The Communists would say secretly, ‘It doesn’t matter if the Islamists are tortured.’ And the Islamists would say, ‘Why not torture Communists?’ ”

The solution was to make basic rights a part of the law, and Mr. Seif gave even Mr. Mubarak credit for moving in that direction, if only for “cosmetic purposes,” Mr. Seif said. In 1999, he helped found the Hisham Mubarak Law Center to support people whose human rights had been violated. It was named for one of Egypt’s first human rights lawyers.

In the cascade of events that have rocked Egypt over the past few years, the center coordinated demonstrations as well as legal representation for arrested protesters. It also trained a new generation of rights lawyers.

Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was elected president after Mr. Mubarak’s fall from power, named Mr. Seif to a commission to investigate the arrests and military court trials that occurred in the 18 months before Mr. Morsi took office. The panel recommended a general amnesty, which Mr. Morsi accepted. Mr. Morsi was ousted in 2013 in a military takeover and succeeded by Mr. Sisi.

Mr. Seif’s wife, Laila Soueif, is a university mathematics professor with a long history of activism. His other daughter, Mona Seif, is a leader of a movement to end the practice of trying civilians in military courts.

When his son was imprisoned last January, Mr. Seif acknowledged in a news conference that his dreams had fallen short.

“I wanted you to inherit a democratic society that guards your rights, my son,” he said, “but instead I passed on the prison cell that held me, and now holds you.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 30, 2014, on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Ahmed Seif, Who Was Tortured in Egypt and Became Rights Defender, Dies at 63. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe